Welcome to the Coilette Podcast. My name is Claire Layman and I am Editor and Chief of Coilette. Coilette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and feelers commentary. Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, Associate Editor Toby Young and Canadian Editor Jonathan K. You can support our podcast by visiting patreon.com/coilette and becoming a monthly patron. By becoming a monthly patron, you'll also receive our weekly newsletter. I'm Jonathan K. The recently aired HBO documentary series Alan V. Ferro was described by the network as a four-part show that "goes behind the years of sensational headlines to reveal the private story of one of Hollywood's most notorious and public scandals. The accusation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen involving Dylan, his then seven-year-old daughter with Mia Ferro, their subsequent custody trial, the revelation of Allen's relationship with Ferro's daughter Suni, and the controversial aftermath in the years that followed." That sounds neutral and objective, but as many reviewers have noted, behind that facade, Alan V. Ferro is actually a heavily torqued attack on Allen. In the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, for instance, Hadley Freeman's article about the series was titled "Allen V. Ferro is pure PR. Why else would it emit so much?" In the article, Freeman described the long list of details that the directors seem to have selectively omitted and described what results as "as biased and partial as a political candidate's advertisement vilifying an opponent in election season." Now if you're looking for someone who's going to treat the Allen Ferro dispute, as a he said, she said argument in which "we'll never know the real truth," well, maybe this isn't the podcast episode for you, because I don't see it in those terms. The claims against Allen were the subject of two major investigations in the 1990s and both reached the same conclusion that there was no convincing evidence that Allen had abused anyone. The question to my mind, rather, is why mainstream networks such as HBO is resurrecting old claims that never had any merit in the first place. To discuss that question this week, my guest is veteran writer Daphne Merkin, formerly of the New Yorker and numerous other elite publications. She has known Woody Allen, albeit mostly in passing, for several decades, and in 2018 she wrote a widely discussed article in New York magazine called "Introducing Sunyeh Previn," in which the longtime wife of Woody Allen finally broke her silence about the many ways in which her story and her husband had been obscenely misrepresented. Daphne Merkin and I shared our opinions about these subjects by Skype. Here are excerpts from our conversation. I'm not going to pretend that I'm some sort of neutral commentator on this. All me of Ferro's accusations were investigated. There was a specialized unit at Yale University then investigated it. How is it that we're still even talking about these accusations? I myself am curious to know why HBO took this on. I think some of the answers to do with the fact that if one can think of it this way, in the age of social media, there is such a thing as a different kind of, you want to call it, "soft power." Mia Ferro has enormous amounts of it, as of course does Ronin, and I think they are capable of simply getting their way. Mia Ferro, very gifted actress, wonderful actress, but has led a very troubled life as a parent. You just said that she has a lot of power and credibility. Not to take anything away from her as an artist, but how does this person have any credibility? They are one is dealing with the gullibility of people, a certain lack of sophistication when it comes to celebrities narrative. Woody Allen himself would say, and has said, that she's a very gifted actress. She wasn't 13 of his movies. So talking about rage, I don't know if some of the rage was also impelled by the fact that essentially her career was over. This is dealing with the question of her rage. The question of people's response to her is, like, up for grabs. My most disturbing conversation. I mean, with some of the name you may know her name, Jeanine Sue Gerson, the professor of law at Harvard Law School. I asked her, I mean, I said, there's something that makes no sense to me here. Through legal due process, there was not just one, but two investigations. There was the Yale investigation, which took seven months. And at the same time, or almost at the same time, there was a New York state child welfare investigation. So there were two inquiries into the case. Both came to the same conclusion that it wasn't credible that we, Allen, had molested Dylan. I spoke to two nannies, we're many nannies in this family. I spoke to two nannies. What they told me was eventually taken out of the piece in New York magazine, but apparently Dylan's nanny, Monica Thompson, eventually retracted a statement she had made and actually said that Woody Allen was the better parent and all the things are not true. Even if you told me Woody Allen's a lousy parent, plenty of lousy parents who don't rape kids. Go on social media and say, look, there's no evidence that Woody Allen molested anybody. People say, don't you think it's creepy that he ended up marrying Suni? And then I stopped and say, wait a second. There are many things in life that are creepy that are not molestation. Exactly, but there you have the brilliantly handled by Mia and company, the conflation of Dylan and Suni, which they're not the same. Mia Farrow herself married it, I don't know, age 17 or 18, Frank Sinatra. But the truth of the matter is she was 21 or older when Woody Allen married her. They've lived happily from what I can see as a couple, as a married couple for 25 years, but somehow that has been conflated with Dylan. I know all this basically from reading the article you wrote in New York magazine. Tell me, what was the reaction you got to that? Because people who support Mia Farrow would be angry about it because what they want is a narrative that Woody Allen's just a big pervert and maybe still has Suni locked up in some sex dungeon. Tell me about the reaction you got from that article. I had very close friends. Four of them wrote me this joint, their articulate email about why I shouldn't write this piece. It would tarnish my reputation forever. Are they basically saying like you're picking the wrong side of the site? Yeah, or you're picking a side that is basically forget wrong or right. Since in the end there is something rachimone like about this story in that believe it, not believe it. No one was there. I mean, I happen on a million grounds not to believe it. For those who have seen the movie rachimone, there are a number of equally or at least approximately equal credible narratives that emerged from that intentionally so. But if you read Moses Farrow's description of the architecture of the home in Connecticut where this child rape is supposed to have taken place with child molestation, the entire story just doesn't make any sense whatsoever based on the architectural principles of the house. You're asked to believe this crazy stuff in a house bursting with life full of people, maybe Alan smuggled this, I think seven year old at the time up a ladder. There's like the area itself where the ladder is like this people could walk in any time for the purpose of engaging in an act, a pedophilic act that he had never done before in his life. I never did it again, because pedophilia is compulsive repetitive. Tragically, people do it when they're 18. They do it when they're 30. They do it when they're 80. Like it's this one of the great tragedies of pedophilia is this evil sickness that afflicts people throughout their lives. The idea of someone laid into middle age is suddenly like, Hey, I think I'll go to the house of this woman who despises me full of people who are related to me and find the seven year old kid and do these horrible things. Kurosawa himself, if you were here, he would insist we are not permitted to invoke Rashomon in the discussion of this conversation. It's not Rashomonian. It's something else. These people who said, don't do it, you're going to hurt your reputation. Reporting facts will hurt your reputation. That's cult cases. But as this Harvard Law professor said to me, I went and looked at this to see if I remembered it correctly. She said, and I think this is a lot to do with it, you know, we're in a social justice moment, whatever that phrase turns out to really mean. And so this professor of law said to me, at this moment, lots of people believe that you should believe the accuser. And then I said to her, two official investigations said there was no abuse. And she said, and which sort of horrified me, she said, there's legal justice that occurs through the legal system. There are other kinds of justice. It's a mistake to equate the legal system with knowledge with the truth. And I think that's, it's sort of like a intellectually deeply suspect version of cultural relativism. Court of public opinion, whatever it once meant, now means social media. And I think in the end, people go by their hunches. They looked at the narrative, the photos. This was saintly me of Pharaoh, who luckily for her is saintly looking, who adopted all these children. And Woody Allen went and had an affair with one of these adopted children, then eventually married her. You know, I never thought about the fact that a lot of people were in the same state.
a lot of this has to do with Mia Farrow does look and jello. If Mia Farrow looked like Fran Drescher, we would not be having this conversation. - As both Woody Allen and Sunyee have said, she's obviously very pretty, very charming, very smart. I mean, I think she managed to steal one husband, Andre Previn. - Andre Previn's ex didn't have nice things to say about Mia Farrow. - No, and she's sung a great song, a bit in a great song about them. - Even watching these two episodes, I personally find Mia Farrow's pseudo-sweet voice, a little thimpering for me, but I can see watching her. She conveys this ethereal. - What's an actress? - Yeah, above the vulgarities of life. - When I think about my worst breakups, when I was mad at people and they were mad at me, there is a moment in some breakups. I don't know that I ever got that back with me, but where if you could bring lightning down from the heavens, and if somebody said to you, this person's gonna go off and have a fairy tale life, and that enrages you, and then you say, but wait a second, you can just say this one thing or make this one allegation, and his life will be destroyed. That's a very powerful thing. And even if that thought of vengeance passes after a few weeks, once you're in, you're in. As much as I think it's terrible what's happened to Woody Allen, these nonsense accusations, I kinda feel sorry for her because I feel on some level, maybe it's the most obvious level, it's the level of cognition. She knows that she's made all the stuff up, but she has to stick with it, and she's lost Moses over it. I feel bad for her because she's a prisoner of this life. - There I disagree with you. My sense of her, which is based on nothing other than, I did read her own memoir, interviewed people about her who are all scared of her, the nannies, someone else didn't wanna go on the record, a friend of Sunyee, a former assistant of Woody Allen, that he'd always been afraid of her. I read and loved Woody Allen's memoir. Woody Allen himself has a weakness for psycho women. So there's a scene in Woody Allen's memoir, if I can't get it out of my head. This is not me, a Pharaoh, this is like 17 girlfriends before me, a Pharaoh, but it's actually one of the great loves of his life. Woody Allen at the time, he's extremely young, he was in a terrible relationship, and he met as woman who they went to a restaurant. He clearly describes it as one of the most important romantic moments of his whole life, and the way he describes it, it's clear that actually many romantic scenes in his movies are seeking to recapture that. But anyway, there's one scene at this time, she's living with Woody Allen, and this food delivery guy comes to the door 'cause they'd ordered food, and forget what it was, something like he forgot one thing, she started screaming at this guy, and she wouldn't pam, basically acted, the kind of person who makes a scene in a restaurant because they could serve the wrong kind of vodka. Everyone in the restaurant is looking at the guy who's with her, or the woman who's with the guy who's making the scene, and thinking, "How could anyone ever live with this person?" I read that scene in the book, and at that moment I thought, if Woody Allen sticks with this woman, 'cause I was reading it like a novel, 'cause I didn't know how it turned out, then shame on him, and he did, he stuck with, and I think there's a moment of self-awareness where he says, "I know what you're thinking, like how could I stay with this woman?" Right. He made some throwaway line about sex, but the kind of guy who stays with that woman, I'm like, "What do you expect?" And it sounds like Woody Allen has been with a lot of women who do that kind of thing. - Well, he was for a long time, as you know, with Diane Keaton, who I also profiled, and it's certainly not nuts, and she's a very strong, interesting woman. - She's the woman in the bow tie? - Yes, I mean, I did refer to him in my New York piece as somewhat or bordering on Aspergian. I don't think he's emotionally, enormously in touch with what he's feeling. I also think he's passive. Mia Farr went after him. He told me her first choice was Mike Nichol. - Yeah, he was a neighbor in Connecticut. - Yes, I once said to him, how come you were so attracted to her? And he said, "Well, she's beautiful." I mean, they did keep those separate residences. I don't know how super involved they were, certainly not by the end. The real issue, frankly, watching the documentary, is you wonder why she stayed with him if she felt about him what she says. - Part of it, as I was reading it, was like, this is what happens when people have too much money. Because the reason they were able to persist in this weird twilight of a relationship is that they both had enough money for their own fancy New York apartments. If you turn these people into middle class people and force them under one roof, their relationship will be over in 20 minutes. - Right. - You gotta share the same bathroom with someone, things get to a head pretty quick. - True. If you're a regular listener to the Kuala'th podcast, you'll be familiar with BetterHelp, one of our original advertisers. Well, thanks to everything that's happened since early 2020 and the stresses that the pandemic has put on everyone, the online therapy services at BetterHelp are more relevant and in demand than ever. 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[email protected]/quilette. Thanks to BetterHelp for their sponsorship and now back to the Kualaete Podcast. 30 or 40 years ago, you and I maybe we'd sit down to watch a documentary. And it might have been like, oh, let's see what this documentary is about. But now by the time a documentary about a serious subject comes out or it's controversial, we've all read articles about it, we've read tweets about it, so much leaks out so quickly, maybe even footage from the documentaries leaked out. So going into watching this documentary, presumably you'd already heard that this was gonna be a hatchet job on Woody Allen, right? - In the Guardian, probably the best piece I've read on the whole issue. - In the Guardian, okay. - She writes, well, "Hadley Freeman." It says, "Alan versus Farrow is pure PR. Why else would it omits so much?" And she's knowledgeable, which I wasn't about the two directors, Amy Zering and Kirby Dick. And apparently the two directors, which I didn't know, one of them calls himself an activist filmmaker. They have been criticized in the past for, quote, "putting advocacy ahead of accuracy" in their 2015 documentary about campus rape hunting ground, which used discredited data. - It's possible to be good activists and a good documentary filmmaker. - Yes. - Michael Moore sometimes has done a good job on that, and I know conservatives who have done a good job. - Supposedly they approached Woody Allen and Sunyee late to ask if they were interested in commenting and they were not, but truthfully, they could have approached many other people. There are only pro-me-up people in this. - It's Moses Farrow in it, because he wrote the definitive defense. - Right, he did, which was paid absolutely no attention to at the time, I remember. - And he was in that house? - He was in that house, and I've talked to him, and he's now very much part of Woody Allen and Sunyee's family. He's in it as a little boy, and so far one hasn't seen him work grown up, and I think the second episode ends somewhere that Mia Farrow gets the family together, tells them of the horror of the photos and the Sunyee relationship, and Moses says he never wants to see Woody Allen again, to whom he was very close. - What Mia did, that itself is like a really abusive thing to do. - Very. - If you're a mother and you want to protect your kids, you're not gonna lie to them, but you don't stage it like the reveal scene in some way. - I totally agree, and that is why my conclusion, I don't think she thinks about what her effect is on other people, including her children, of all the scenes that one of the most chilling, I think she used her children, the ones she related to. I don't think she related that well to the adopted children. One thing I noticed, oddly, in the documentary is when when you see scenes of Connecticut, and the kids in the very nice looking lake, they're mostly the non-adopted kids. - To her credit, she took on some really medically troubled kids, but then she would make weird decisions. - Right. - She kept changing their names. - It was a construction for her. I don't know how much reality is in it, and as someone who barely survived a large family of six, I don't admire either that she adopted that many children, or that some of them had serious medical conditions. Because if you're gonna do that, you need to be enormously large-hearted, attentive. I mean, if you believe Moses Sadias, who was one of the adopted kids, who was a powerplegic, and wore braces, Mia kept insisting he could try and walk without them. And in general, paid no attention to him, I talk to his high school student.
teacher in my interviewing from my piece and she said no one came to his high school graduation. I don't find it admirable on any level. I think it was all part of a fantasy of herself as the redeeming saint and somehow these children were supposed to fit into her fantasy and if they didn't, whoa on to the children. But much of Mia's life seems to have existed in fantasy including the accusations, like the very idea that Woody Allen was going to take his child up the attic to play with a train. There was no electric train in the attic and the detail of the train apparently comes from the lyric to a song by Dory Previn who's husband left her for Mia in 1970. There's this whole like sort of incest thing in the song called with my daddy in the attic by Dory Previn and is about incest and molestation. It's the same album with the song about Mia that Dory Previn wrote, Beware Young Girls, which was about Mia's affair with Andre Previn. I think she has a mixture of like a would-be saintly and gossic imagination. Doesn't Woody in his memoir talk about the deranged Valentine she sent? Yeah with the pins. Like little mini daggers. Well that's nine and a half week stuff. The rage in the beginning is comprehensible but this is now four decades of indictiveness. Right after she said it she could never go back. That's why I feel sorry for it because she knows she can't go back. I don't think she thinks she fabricated all of this. Not at this point. I don't think she sticks to it because she thinks I must stick to it. I think she doesn't have the psychological if you want to call it super ego to know where the difference between between being manipulative and being sincere. I must say in my piece about Sunni a lot was taken out because of fear of Ronan particularly. It's very one-sided like there's a lot of garbage that gets thrown at Woody Allen that seems to be very legally problematic. How come Woody Allen doesn't just start suing people? Good question which I've never asked him. I don't think it's his as they say MO. I think there's a part of him that for a long time thought this would go away. His book is very interesting. The first maybe 250 pages is funny and lighthearted and then there's this phase shift and the last maybe 150 pages are this scathing highly detailed highly evidenced denunciation of the campaign of lies against him. Has anyone tried to sue Woody Allen over his book? I have written many many pieces in my life including about I think the most litigious organization that exists which is the Kabbalah center. Are they litigious? When I wrote about them for the times they were very quick to threaten a lawsuit. Really? So they're like the Scientologists of the Jewish community? I have never had an experience close to the experience I had writing the piece in New York in terms of what I thought was excessive concern. I can give you one example. Sure. Very very late in the day. I have to come in and sit with two lawyers from New York and go over every single detail and I was on the New Yorker staff for close to six years which is vetting nuts and I have never seen this kind of caution. The piece was basically set to go. I mean I remember sitting in my editor's office, Ronan or someone I don't know how it happened that they had found an essay that I had written in a book called The Fame Lunches, a collection of essays and the title essay is about wounded celebrities that I identified with celebrities I thought were really wounded and one of them was Woody Allen. I talk about a lunch, emphasis on one lunch that I had with Woody Allen who might met anyway because he wrote me a fan letter when I was a young writer at the New Republic for review I did of a book by Jane Bowles which most people would never have heard of. Somehow this thing came in that I was a besotted fan and I said to the editor, not only am I not a besotted fan, you know, he would write me once a year or I would write him something we would meet for a drink once or twice a year. I was never invited to his famous large Christmas and New Year's parties so I had written I have known Woody Allen over four decades. This had to be changed which I said was going to be totally used and it was to friends with Woody Allen. There's a big difference saying I have known someone for four decades from saying I've been good friends with this person. Of course I would be seen as complicit and that was I thought Ronan's triumphs. The piece to the extent it was criticized it was all around that issue but you don't call someone you see once a year a very good friend and there were years I never saw him. 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But I think it has marked me but I already had marked myself with writing, you know, a piece questioning me too in the time. So there's a woman involved here who's at the center of it and her name is Sunyee and people are treating her like she's someone Tomaton. Right. Now she's a middle-aged woman. Right. And you kind of treated her as someone with autonomy. Tell me about your relationship with her. I think I was expecting a very different person from all these descriptions. She's very funny charming in a certain kind of way resilient as can be intellectually absorbed curious. Every time I've loved a book, Woody often reads it and she does too. I found her straight forward. She wasn't someone who if I said, don't you have good memories of Mia? She said, I don't, I really don't. But on the other hand, she said, but there were admirable things about Mia that I wish she would have passed on. She's a survivor in many ways. Which makes sense given her backstory when she was in Korea. It was hand to mouth. Underlyingly, there is some racist undertone to this that she's Korean. I think there's a lot of dismissal of her in a sort of instinctual way. Putting aside all this nonsense, they're actually like pretty happy. Yeah. I think I wasn't expecting so much equality or as he says, you know, if you want to know who runs things, it's Sun-yee that they palpably enjoy each other. Sort of like the six-wise of Henry VIII, where women are supposed to fall into a category of shrew or or wench or nurse or. Right. But it sounds like this wasn't the case here. It was actually like a fairly well-rounded relationship. Yeah. I think he called it a lucky accident because they didn't think it was going to last. Neither of them did in the beginning. I think at some point he fell in love with her. She certainly fell in love with him. I know when I have seen them, I thought they make a convincing case for marriage. I think that's the highest compliment you could ever pay anybody. Right. Definitely Merkin. Thank you so much. Thank you. If you would like to support Quillette, please consider becoming a patron. Head to our Patreon page. That's patreon.com/quillette. If you haven't already, follow us on social media. We're on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Do you like what you're hearing? Perhaps you would like to read more about the issues in today's discussion. Head to Quillette.com where you'll find more content.
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